The Thinking Reed

In connection with Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, in which he demanded that belles-lettres be at last allowed creative autonomy, V. Sosnora wrote: ‘The censor-in-chief, like Jesus Christ, has his twelve apostles, who watchfully protect and stoutly defend this responsible personage. We do not have just one guilty censor. We have twelve.’102 These are the author himself, the editors at different stages, the reviewers, and so on. It often happens that by the time a work reaches Glavlit there is nothing in it to be censored. Selfcensorship flourished especially in the Stalin era when, essentially, no ordinary censorship was needed. People were on the one hand so frightened, and on the other so indoctrinated by systematic propaganda, that they not only wrote but thought as the government wanted. It was typical of the time that the ‘thick’ literary journals such as Novy Mir were, generally speaking, not censored under Stalin. A piece of fiction or poetry which had been approved for printing by the editor-in-chief could not be deleted by Glavlit. This arrangement explains how V. Ovechkin’s sketches on the Soviet countryside could appear in print, and later, after Stalin’s death, the articles by V. Pomerantsev, F. Abramov and M. Lifshits which aroused the fury of conservative-bureaucratic circles. On the contrary, however, under Khrushchev it was necessary for Tvardovsky, as editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, to wage a running fight with the censorship, which was openly unwilling to recognize his authority. The curious ‘liberalism’ of the Stalin era was possible only given the conditions of a totalitarian regime when all free thought was stifled and there was nothing left to stifle.

Marx, who devoted several articles to establishing the principle of press freedom, considered this situation the most dangerous of all:

Among the special obstacles to the press we must include not only individual difficulties dues to censorship, but equally the special circumstances which made censorship itself superfluous because they did not allow the object of censorship to come into being at all, even tentatively. When the censorship comes into obvious, persistent and sharp conflict with the press, it can be concluded with a fair certainty that the press has achieved vitality, character and self-assurance, for only a perceptible action produces a perceptible reaction. When, on the other hand, there is no censorship because there is no press, although the need for a free and therefore censorablc press exists, one must expect to find a pre-censorship in circumstances which have suppressed by fear the expression of thought even in its more unpretentious forms.103

The history of the Soviet state fully confirms Marx’s view that censorship and any attack on the freedom of the press is a form of ‘the most frigh tfu l terrorism ’.104

It was the series of unorthodox works published in Novy Mir after Stalin’s death that led to the tightening of the censorship, for only then did ideas appear in our society which needed to be hunted down in the press. The Stalin era, being a period of complete lawlessness, was also a period of relatively liberal legislation. Only later, in connection with the quickening of public life, were the prohibitory laws made increasingly precise, as though to confirm Marx’s words:

The law against a frame of mind is not a law of the state promulgated for its citizens but the law of one party against another party.… Laws against frame of mind are based on an unprincipled frame of mind, on an immoral, material view of the state. They are the involuntary cry of a bad conscience.105